Author's Notes: I put up this first chapter years ago and never completed the story. I hope to fix that now. I reread this chapter and found a few of the sentences very clumsy so I'll be editing this chapter for clarity and moving on.
The story takes place after the Evelda Drumgo incident but without any of the rest of Hannibal having taken place.
The man paged through several back issues of The National Tattler as he sat in his spacious sedan. The interior was pure black leather which had heated up nicely throughout the day as he sat. Now that night had fallen he was glad for the heat as he was not able to start the car and use the heat and it was merely by the ambient light reflected off his side-mirror that he was able to read the headlines. They were over three months old now so this was no longer news to anyone save those who followed the subject with more than a passing interest.
The issues were a library of tabloids, mostly the Tattler, recounting the career of a woman most people didn't remember the name of. She'd had her fifteen minutes of fame when she'd caught that godawful man who had been skinning people on the East Coast, Buffalo Bill was what the papers had called him. But the FBI agent was merely a flash in the pan for the American media and they'd quickly moved on to more salacious and scandalous stories. In fact, she'd been nearly forgotten when about seven years after that incident with that . . . that freak, and as such about three months ago, her name started appearing back in the papers. Sure, there was an odd incident when she'd been involved in a shootout before that would create a little spread in the papers, but nothing like this. Never anything like this.
You see, this one-hit-wonder had found herself in a rather grisly shootout a few months back. She was up against some pretty tough folks, a bunch of drug dealers but what the papers wanted to focus on was the fact that this pretty little FBI agent had gunned down a mother holding her child in her arms. The picture of a woman kneeling protectively over her child was splattered across every front page in much the same way her brains were in each photo.
The tabloids had attacked her misfortune like hungry wolves, ripping into her life the way they had the day her name had been put next to Buffalo Bill's and even better, that monstrous curiosity Hannibal the Cannibal. Anyone mentioned in tandem with these two creatureswould surely avail interesting news if you shook it hard enough in your gnashing fangs. Now, however, their prey seemed subdued and dormant. The proceedings and trials at the J. Edgar Hoover building were now long-over, the book closed on Clarice M. Starling. Her name was dragged through the dirt and her life had been torn apart by the bureau, the bureaucracy, that she had given herself to and risked her life to please. It's alright though, she got a nice two months severance pay when she was censured and subsequently discharged.
And on this night, three months after her official discharge she pulled her Mustang into her side of the carport outside her and Ardelia Mapp's duplex. She didn't even see the luxury sedan parked in front of the pickup truck at the opposite side of the cul-de-sac where the man continued to leaf through the Tattler, with his attention now diverted.